Hacker News Reader

Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

It might be interesting to recall that Alan Turing was an Olympics team contender for 1948~1949

Harald Bohr won a silver medal at the 1908 Olympics with the Danish football team. He was also a notable mathematician, an editor for Acta Mathematica and he discovered the fascinating Fastperiodische Funktionen.

Sports and academics were not unusual in his family: his brother Niels (not an Olympian, but a known physicist) had a son Ernest who was an Olympian in 1948 (hockey).

Unlike his father and brother Aage, Ernest did not win a Nobel (he was a lawyer).

Thanks for adding this anecdote. Is it the same mathematician who worked on almost periodic functions ? I have run into those in my line of work. On second thoughts, I guess that's what Fastperiodische Funktionen means.

On a different note this would be the third example where the person concerned is Danish.

Was entertained by how you wrote about all those relations and associations it felt like those logic puzzles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_Puzzle

Honest question: why would this be interesting in this context?

(Edit: check the follow-up comments to see why I wasn't as surprised as others about Ms. Kiesenhofer being both sportswomen and active academic and therefore did not make the connection with Mr. Turing immediately)

Because he's also a Mathematician in the Olympics, similar to (but not as successful) as Mrs. Kiesenhofer. We like when nerds are not completely 1 dimensional.

Hmm, I've got a friend who won the German championship in their sport (watersport, individual) and went on to get a PhD in math, so maybe that's why the idea of both being a successful sportsman and following an academic career was not exactly foreign to me. Thanks for replying!

Why don't you call her Dr. Kiesenhofer then? Esp. Austrians love their titles.

It’s super rare to be intellectually gifted and a world-class athlete. There was an NFL offensive lineman with a published mathematical paper as well, but I didn’t know about Turing’s physical talents until now.

I don’t know of any other instances of brilliant people being paid or awarded medals for their physical abilities, so I personally found it interesting.

I guess the parent comment was for those of us that were intrigued by the intersection of top-tier physical and mental abilities.

It’s also a healthy correction for the nerds-versus-jocks dichotomy which was so common for years. There are a non-trivial number of people who actively questioned someone’s technical competency if they were athletic or assumed that the only way to be a successful academic was to grind everything else out of their life.

My experience is that high-achievers in one area are often high-achievers in other areas as well. For academics as well as athletics, individual ability matters, but the discipline and work-ethic that most high-achievers have translates across fields.

Yes - also simply the circumstances: if you’re in a position to do either well, you probably don’t have serious chronic health problems, family demands, poverty, etc. That doesn’t make it easy but it makes it possible to focus on something more than survival, much as how coming from a financially stable family makes it easier for someone to take a gamble on a startup rather than a safer job at a big company.

There's https://news.mit.edu/2019/student-john-urschel-math-football... .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com